Almost Certain: The Problem of Knowledge in <i>The History of the Nun</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689) displays a range of narrative peculiarities, related to its narrator, tone, and ending, which frequently puzzle critics and readers. I argue that the epistemological uncertainties that escalate when it is not clear whether detection of crimes requires God’s assistance, empirical observations, or adroit calculations of probability manifest as narrative oddities in Behn’s fiction. By focusing on formal features against a backdrop of theological and philosophical debates about knowledge prevalent at the end of the seventeenth century, this article provides a new explanation for the edgy and unstable narrative traits of Behn’s fiction and responds to the standard critical thinking on the author’s treatment of religion. Irrespective of Behn’s personal beliefs, the form and the plot of The History of the Nun manifest conflicts of a culture that was at once attracted to and troubled by the notion of divine Providence, especially with regard to detection and judgment of crimes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".